I bet you didn't know this about your wedding day?

So Viv and I were talking the pother day about wedding traditions and the like and we were musing about confetti; what, where, and why etc So off to the interweb we went and some interesting info was found and I thought that I would share a bit of the at info here for you

Confetti is an Italian word used for a type of sugared almond tossed into the air during special occasions. In Britain, throwing grains of rice at newlyweds goes back to pagan weddings, when it was seen as a symbol of fertility. It was the Victorians – perhaps sick of picking food out of their hair – who first used shredded paper; in 1875 an Italian businessman from Milan, Enrico Mangili, began selling paper confetti for use in the upcoming carnevale di Milano, the yearly parade held along the streets of the city.

At that time, the province of Milan was one of the main hubs of silk manufacturing. Mangili begun collecting the small punched paper disks that were left as a byproduct from the production of the holed sheets used by the silkworm breeders as cage bedding, and selling them for profit. The new paper confetti were well received by the customers, being less harmful, funnier and cheaper than the alternatives, and their use quickly replaced previous customs in Milan and northern Italy.

A recent innovation at weddings is to use natural petal confetti. These are made from freeze-dried flower petals and are completely biodegradable. In fact many venues now state that only these biodegradable versions may be used. Some wedding venues have decided that due to the mess and potential inconvenience caused by the use of confetti to ban it usage completely. One way that this restriction has been circumvented is to use soap bubbles in place of confetti.